All of Europe gets more time off in the business world than in the US. Here, 2 weeks a year is standard. Maybe 3 if you have been at a job a long time. I think 4-6 weeks is pretty standard over there.
How can so many major game aspects be broken?
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The very minimum what should happen ASAP is an intense internal bugfixing project on Stellaris, should even include a review for all the old bugs that still exist and will be forever if nothing changes and noone feels responsible for this. I mean, look at CK2 or EU4, these games are more than enjoyable in regards to bugs, Stellaris for me personally is unplayable right now 
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In Germany 4 weeks is minimum by law, most white collar jobs get more. Sweden does have more than that. And I just googled that January 5th and 6th are holidays by law in Sweden and it is quite common to have a holiday break from December 23rd until January 6th.
But I don't know what is going on this week.
Well, it would be quite expensive for a company like Paradox in Sweden. The company would need to cover all expenses due to cancelling like travel costs. And even than it is not sure that Paradox would be allowed to call their employees back to work because of law regulations. I'm not sure that a bugged product like Stellaris would allow such a callback since a game is not that important, there is no time limit when it has to work and can also be repaired after the break.
The only right thing to do was not to release before Christmas. The prioritazation of marketing and milking money by upper management is the real insult to long lasting customers.
But hey, as I wrote previously, if customers keep buying when you insult them, you have very little reason not to continue doing so.
But hey, as I wrote previously, if customers keep buying when you insult them, you have very little reason not to continue doing so.
This is the reason why it should be problematized this time, set a sign that we want to have a working game as a next milestone, not new content ontop of broken one...
I love to buy new content for my favourite games, but id also would love to play them joyfully!
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Like I said earlier - whomever is the project manager for Stellaris needs to go.
The current recent reviews of Stellaris on steam are at 57% approval (mixed, shown in bad brown color). This is very low and bad for a steam game.
The current reviews of Megacorp on steam are at 61% approval (mixed, shown in bad brown color). This is also very low and bad for a steam game.
This is the language that the upper-management people speak, so they have no doubt realised they fucked up. The bad performance, lag, stutter, braindead AI, not finished crisis, etc. are completely obvious problems, so the developers and QA have known about the issues for much longer obviously.
The game is clearly in a very bad state right now and it was super rushed for the Christmas sales. An apology was not given (yet) because it would have badly affected Christmas sales (which was the reason for rushing the game). The holidays are over now and sales are going down, therefore we will get an apology soon.
This is just business as usual. But hey, they made fun of EA's inferior business practices of selling lootboxes!
The current reviews of Megacorp on steam are at 61% approval (mixed, shown in bad brown color). This is also very low and bad for a steam game.
This is the language that the upper-management people speak, so they have no doubt realised they fucked up. The bad performance, lag, stutter, braindead AI, not finished crisis, etc. are completely obvious problems, so the developers and QA have known about the issues for much longer obviously.
The game is clearly in a very bad state right now and it was super rushed for the Christmas sales. An apology was not given (yet) because it would have badly affected Christmas sales (which was the reason for rushing the game). The holidays are over now and sales are going down, therefore we will get an apology soon.
This is just business as usual. But hey, they made fun of EA's inferior business practices of selling lootboxes!
The question is, is it more expensive than the long term financial damage tanking their review score on their main sales platform is going to do, combined with the huge loss of existing customer confidence in their product? Stellaris relies on regular expansions to make money, that all stems from the base game, people pick it up normally when it's on sale, enjoy it then feed into the rest of the stellaris ecosystem. With that base game sitting at 57% and a mixed review score, those missed sales are going to have a knock on effect to the other expansion content that customer would have otherwise bought down the road. That one review score is a far bigger deal then you'd think.
I honestly don't know the legalities of the holiday situation, all I know is that their review scores are tanking, this means a loss of earnings and that may potentially lead to a loss of jobs. Even if you ignore having the pride in your work to want to stay back and fix it, surely they should have the self interest to know that nipping this in the bud quickly is the best way to stem losses and secure income and therefore ensure it never reaches a scenario where jobs are at risk. It shouldn't be a matter of whether it's legal or not, the developers should want to do this for themselves and their community, assuming of course the company grants them that time off once the game is fixed and their income secure.
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Well... unfortunately no. They made it clear on one of their podcast series ("The business of video game") that steam reviews are bullshit and not representative of the business reality. They look at revenues generated by their marketing campaign and internal metrics to decide if what they do is "right" from a business perspective. When money flows, they couldn't care less about reviews.
Edit: Here is the podcast episode. Not sure where the segment I'm referring to is though.
(And on a sidenote, I really appreciate PDX effort to talk about the business side of the video game industry, but I won't hide that it made me more cynical about PDX as a whole).
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Hey, don't touch ES1.
Amazing turn-based game.
Combat model is weird and clunky with auto-resolve embedded, but other than that the strategic game is awesome.
And planet building was much less clunky and more profound. It was a pleasure to measure up what the system can do, then terraform all planets in it and build up towards your goal (ship production or science).
ES2 is the same bugged mess as Stellaris though, clear example what happens to small indie companies when thy sell their soul to SEGA.
Did the "other players can react to all your movements in the game in real time, in a turn-based game, even the instant-reaction AI in single-player" thing not bother you?
Well... unfortunately no. They made it clear on one of their podcast series ("The business of video game") that steam reviews are bullshit and not representative of the business reality. They look at revenues generated by their marketing campaign and internal metrics to decide if what they do is "right" from a business perspective. When money flows, they couldn't care less about reviews.
Edit: Here is the podcast episode. Not sure where the segment I'm referring to is though.
(And on a sidenote, I really appreciate PDX effort to talk about the business side of the video game industry, but I won't hide that it made me more cynical about PDX as a whole).
Well I hope if any Paradox marketers are reading this you measure more than ROI. This whole launch has made me change my perception of them, I'm no longer first in line to pre-order and play on release. Brand loyalty takes a long time to build and can be destroyed quickly.
Solutions.
- Be transparent and tell the community what went wrong and how and when you'll fix things. Paradox used to be all about open communication but that seems lacking at the moment.
- Stop adding new features when core elements of the game aren't working correctly. Fix the base game. Yes you need expansions to continue the on-going running of the development team but take a hit and fix things now.
Have to say I didn't find it that buggy. Just... boring. I don't know why though.
Every expansion pack for Stellaris has released with a large bunch of bugs and unfinished mechanics and hardly anything in the game is polished. In that sense Megacorp has not been the worst (remember Utopia?)
he already got swapped over to a "new exciting project" shortly after they had released and before the state of the patch had fully been realised by most customers.
The amount of backpatting and "good job" comments was amazing, and those of us that had negative comments on the whole ordeal quickly got a ton of negative comments and votes.
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Love Stellaris but it's getting frustrating...
After all the money I have spent in this game not a single Crisis I've experienced has worked properly.
Isn't that supposed to be the biggest endgame feature?
Stop adding tons of content if you cannot make the previous stuff work.
After all the money I have spent in this game not a single Crisis I've experienced has worked properly.
Isn't that supposed to be the biggest endgame feature?
Stop adding tons of content if you cannot make the previous stuff work.
The last version of the game that has been truly unified in design, with everything working more-or-less as intended was 1.9. I'm not saying the 1.9 mechanics were better, but taken as a whole, the the game simply achieved a better symbiosis between all its moving parts in 1.9 than it ever has since.
When 2.0 came out, there were a lot of problems. To the point that people here, on reddit, and on the steam forums told me to come back in six months when they'd be fixed. It's now been a year, and it feels like the developers have no actual vision for what they want Stellaris to be.
Any given system that was introduced post-1.9 could work in a vacuum. New war and white peace, the market, piracy, static defenses, new planetary management, and new sectors. All of them could be refined to be solid... on their own. The problem is not the systems and mechanics themselves -- the problem is that PDX has seemingly given zero thought as to how these systems interact with each other and how one problem can have a butterfly effect that breaks other parts of the game. This is no more obvious than it is when we look at how the AI has been on a steady descent ever since 2.0 launched. Each major patch has damaged the AI worse, because they simply cannot juggle all of these systems at once in such a way that lets them succeed.
But you see it other places, too. This planet overhaul has lead to odd changes in certain playstyles (you can see all the posts here about robot empires, fanatic purifiers, etc.). It's made ascendency perks less useful or even out-and-out useless and harmful.
This constant cycle of refining a system for years only to completely knock it down and start over has damaged the game in a fundamental way that I don't think it will ever truly recover from. It seems like these builds aren't even tested, sometimes, because some of these oversights are so obvious that the community catches them almost immediately.
Making a good system isn't good enough if it sucks when it's combined with the rest of the game. There are tons of interesting mechanics that you could add, but they have to go well with everything else. The new planetary system is excellent example of this. In a game about managing planets and nothing else it would be pretty good. But Stellaris isn't that game. When you add it to Stellaris, you just get an insane amount of micro that takes your attention away from so many other parts of the game. Stellaris has become a Frankenstein game of disparate mechanics, instead of a harmony of systems that all contribute to one, unified whole.
I also don't think it's a coincidence that this has been the worst year for Stellaris when it comes to reviews on Steam. Every DLC has stayed at "mixed", and the main game has had its main review score fall ever since 2.0 came out, with big batches of bad reviews coming in with each subsequent update. At what point do you stop blaming the audience, and start acknowledging that something is going wrong with the direction of the game? I don't think it's unfair to call 2.2 and 2.2.3 "unplayable" with how badly performance and AI have tanked.
Every update, I find myself inevitably going back to 1.9. The game simply worked better then than it has since. I don't even buy DLC anymore because I know that I won't be able to play it after rolling back.
I loved Stellaris, and I want nothing more than for it to get better and improve again. But if 2019 is the same as 2018, I'm just not holding my breath.
When 2.0 came out, there were a lot of problems. To the point that people here, on reddit, and on the steam forums told me to come back in six months when they'd be fixed. It's now been a year, and it feels like the developers have no actual vision for what they want Stellaris to be.
Any given system that was introduced post-1.9 could work in a vacuum. New war and white peace, the market, piracy, static defenses, new planetary management, and new sectors. All of them could be refined to be solid... on their own. The problem is not the systems and mechanics themselves -- the problem is that PDX has seemingly given zero thought as to how these systems interact with each other and how one problem can have a butterfly effect that breaks other parts of the game. This is no more obvious than it is when we look at how the AI has been on a steady descent ever since 2.0 launched. Each major patch has damaged the AI worse, because they simply cannot juggle all of these systems at once in such a way that lets them succeed.
But you see it other places, too. This planet overhaul has lead to odd changes in certain playstyles (you can see all the posts here about robot empires, fanatic purifiers, etc.). It's made ascendency perks less useful or even out-and-out useless and harmful.
This constant cycle of refining a system for years only to completely knock it down and start over has damaged the game in a fundamental way that I don't think it will ever truly recover from. It seems like these builds aren't even tested, sometimes, because some of these oversights are so obvious that the community catches them almost immediately.
Making a good system isn't good enough if it sucks when it's combined with the rest of the game. There are tons of interesting mechanics that you could add, but they have to go well with everything else. The new planetary system is excellent example of this. In a game about managing planets and nothing else it would be pretty good. But Stellaris isn't that game. When you add it to Stellaris, you just get an insane amount of micro that takes your attention away from so many other parts of the game. Stellaris has become a Frankenstein game of disparate mechanics, instead of a harmony of systems that all contribute to one, unified whole.
I also don't think it's a coincidence that this has been the worst year for Stellaris when it comes to reviews on Steam. Every DLC has stayed at "mixed", and the main game has had its main review score fall ever since 2.0 came out, with big batches of bad reviews coming in with each subsequent update. At what point do you stop blaming the audience, and start acknowledging that something is going wrong with the direction of the game? I don't think it's unfair to call 2.2 and 2.2.3 "unplayable" with how badly performance and AI have tanked.
Every update, I find myself inevitably going back to 1.9. The game simply worked better then than it has since. I don't even buy DLC anymore because I know that I won't be able to play it after rolling back.
I loved Stellaris, and I want nothing more than for it to get better and improve again. But if 2019 is the same as 2018, I'm just not holding my breath.
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Right? I'm the same way. Endless Legend is one of my favorite 4X games, and on paper ES2 should have everything I want. Just... for some reason I can't get into it.